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Who's Who - Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)
was born on April 20, 1889, the fourth child of Alois Schickelgruber and
Klara Hitler in the Austrian town of Braunau.

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Two of his siblings died
from diphtheria when they were children, and one died shortly after birth.
Alois was a customs official, illegitimate by birth, who was described by
his housemaid as a "very strict but comfortable" man. Young Adolf was
showered with love and affection by his mother.

When Adolf was three years
old, the family moved to Passau, along the Inn River on the German side of
the border. A brother, Edmond, was born two years later. The
family moved once more in 1895 to the farm community of Hafeld, 30 miles
southwest of Linz. A nother sister, Paula, was born in 1896, the sixth of
the union, supplemented by a half brother and half sister from one of his
father's two previous marriages.

Following another family
move, Adolf lived for six months across from a large Benedictine monastery.
The monastery's coat of arms' most salient feature was a swastika. As
a youngster, Adolf's dream was to enter the priesthood. While there is
anecdotal evidence that Adolf's father regularly beat him during his
childhood, it was not unusual for discipline to be enforced in that way
during that period.

By 1900, Hitler's talents
as an artist surfaced. He did well enough in school to be eligible for
either the university preparatory "gymnasium" or the technical/scientific
Realschule. Because the latter had a course in drawing, Adolf accepted
his father's decision to enrol him in the Realschule. He did not do
well there.

Adolf's father died in 1903
after suffering a pleural haemorrhage. Adolf himself suffered from
lung infections, and he quit school at the age of 16, partially the result
of ill health and partially the result of poor school work.

In 1906, Adolf was
permitted to visit Vienna, but he was unable to gain admission to a
prestigious art school. His mother developed terminal breast cancer
and was treated by Dr. Edward Bloch, a Jewish doctor who served the poor.
After an operation and excruciatingly painful and expensive treatments with
a dangerous drug, she died on December 21, 1907.

Hitler spent six years in
Vienna, living on a small legacy from his father and an orphan's pension.
Virtually penniless by 1909, he wandered Vienna as a transient, sleeping in
bars, flophouses, and shelters for the homeless, including, ironically,
those financed by Jewish philanthropists. It was during this period
that he developed his prejudices about Jews, his interest in politics, and
debating skills.

According to John Toland's
biography, Adolf Hitler, two of his closest friends at this time were
Jewish, and he admired Jewish art dealers and Jewish operatic performers and
producers. However, Vienna was a centre of anti-Semitism, and the
media's portrayal of Jews as scapegoats with stereotyped attributes did not
escape Hitler's fascination.

In May 1913, Hitler,
seeking to avoid military service, left Vienna for Munich, the capital of
Bavaria, following a windfall received from an aunt who was dying. In
January, the police came to his door bearing a draft notice from the
Austrian government. The document threatened a year in prison and a
fine if he was found guilty of leaving his native land with the intent of
evading conscription.

Hitler was arrested on the
spot and taken to the Austrian Consulate. Upon reporting to Salzburg
for duty, he was found "unfit... too weak... and unable to bear arms."

Hitler's World War I
Service

When World War I was
touched off by the assassination by a Serb of the heir to the Austrian
Empire, Archduke
Franz Ferdinand, Hitler's passions against foreigners,
particularly Slavs, were inflamed. He was caught up in the patriotism
of the time, and submitted a petition to enlist in the Bavarian army.

In October 1916, he was
wounded by an enemy shell and evacuated to a Berlin area hospital.
After recovering, and serving a total of four years in the trenches, he was
temporarily blinded by a mustard gas attack in Belgium in October 1918.

Communist-inspired
insurrections shook Germany while Hitler was recovering from his injuries.
Some Jews were leaders of these abortive revolutions, and this inspired
hatred of Jews as well as Communists. On November 9th,
the
Kaiser abdicated and the Socialists gained control of the
government. Anarchy was more the rule in the cities.

Free Corps

The Free Corps was a
paramilitary organization composed of vigilante war veterans who banded
together to fight the growing Communist insurgency which was taking over
Germany. The Free Corps crushed this insurgency. Its members formed
the nucleus of the Nazi "brown-shirts" (S.A.) which served as the Nazi
party's army.

Weimar Republic

With the
loss
of the war, the German monarchy came to an end and a
republic was proclaimed.
A constitution was written providing for a President with broad political
and military power and a parliamentary democracy.

A national election was
held to elect 423 deputies to the National Assembly. The centrist
parties swept to victory. The result was what is known as the Weimar
Republic.

On June 28, 1919, the
German government ratified the
Treaty of Versailles.
Under the terms of the treaty which ended hostilities in the war, Germany
had to pay reparations for all civilian damages caused by the war.
Germany also lost her colonies and large portions of German territory.
A 30-mile strip on the right bank of the Rhine was demilitarized.
Limits were placed on German armaments and military strength.

The terms of the treaty
were humiliating to most Germans, and condemnation of its terms undermined
the government and served as a rallying cry for those who like Hitler
believed Germany was ultimately destined for greatness.

German Worker's Party

Soon after the war, Hitler
was recruited to join a military intelligence unit, and was assigned to keep
tabs on the German Worker's Party. At the time, it was comprised of
only a handful of members. It was disorganized and had no program, but
its members expressed a right-wing doctrine consonant with Hitler's.

He saw this party as a
vehicle to reach his political ends. His blossoming hatred of the Jews
became part of the organization's political platform. Hitler built up
the party, converting it from a de facto discussion group to an actual
political party.

Advertising for the party's
meetings appeared in anti-Semitic newspapers. The turning point of
Hitler's mesmerizing oratorical career occurred at one such meeting held on
October 16, 1919. Hitler's emotional delivery of an impromptu speech
captivated his audience.

Through word of mouth,
donations poured into the party's coffers, and subsequent mass meetings
attracted hundreds of Germans eager to hear the young, forceful and hypnotic
leader.

With the assistance of
party staff, Hitler drafted a party program consisting of twenty-five
points. This platform was presented at a public meeting on February
24, 1920, with over 2,000 eager participants. After hecklers were
forcibly removed by Hitler supporters armed with rubber truncheons and
whips, Hitler electrified the audience with his masterful demagoguery.

Jews were the principal
target of his diatribe. Among the 25 points were revoking the
Versailles Treaty, confiscating war profits, expropriating land without
compensation for use by the state, revoking civil rights for Jews, and
expelling those Jews who had emigrated into Germany after the war began.

The following day, The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion were published in the local anti-Semitic
newspaper. The false, but alarming accusations reinforced Hitler's
anti-Semitism. Soon after, treatment of the Jews was a major theme of
Hitler's orations, and the increasing scapegoating of the Jews for
inflation, political instability, unemployment, and the humiliation in the
war, found a willing audience.

Jews were tied to
"internationalism" by Hitler. The name of the party was changed to the
National Socialist German Worker's party, and the red flag with the swastika
was adopted as the party symbol. A local newspaper which appealed to
anti-Semites was on the verge of bankruptcy, and Hitler raised funds to
purchase it for the party.

In January 1923, French and
Belgian troops marched into Germany to settle a reparations dispute.
Germans resented this occupation, which also had an adverse effect on the
economy. Hitler's party benefited by the reaction to this development,
and exploited it by holding mass protest rallies despite a ban on such
rallies by the local police.

The Nazi party began
drawing thousands of new members, many of whom were victims of
hyper-inflation and found comfort in blaming the Jews for this trouble.
The price of an egg, for example, had inflated to 30 million times its
original price in just 10 years. Economic upheaval generally breeds
political upheaval, and Germany in the 1920s was no exception.

The Munich Putsch

The Bavarian government
defied the Weimar Republic, accusing it of being too far left. Hitler
endorsed the fall of the Weimar Republic, and declared at a public rally on
October 30, 1923 that he was prepared to march on Berlin to rid the
government of the Communists and the Jews.

On November 8, 1923, Hitler
held a rally at a Munich beer hall and proclaimed a revolution. The
following day, he led 2,000 armed "brown-shirts" in an attempt to take over
the Bavarian government.

This putsch was resisted
and put down by the police, after more than a dozen were killed in the
fighting. Hitler suffered a broken and dislocated arm in the melee,
was arrested, and was imprisoned at Landsberg. He received a five-year
sentence.

Mein Kampf

Hitler served only nine
months of his five-year term. While in prison, he wrote the first
volume of Mein Kampf. It was partly an autobiographical book
(although filled with glorified inaccuracies, self-serving half-truths and
outright revisionism) which also detailed his views on the future of the
German people.

There were several targets
of the vicious diatribes in the book, such as democrats, Communists, and
internationalists. But he reserved the brunt of his vituperation for
the Jews, whom he portrayed as responsible for all of the problems and evils
of the world, particularly democracy, Communism, and internationalism, as
well as Germany's defeat in the War.

Jews were the German
nation's true enemy, he wrote. They had no culture of their own, he
asserted, but perverted existing cultures such as Germany's with their
parasitism. As such, they were not a race, but an anti-race.

"[The Jews'] ultimate goal
is the denaturalization, the promiscuous bastardization of other peoples,
the lowering of the racial level of the highest peoples as well as the
domination of his racial mishmash through the extirpation of the folkish
intelligentsia and its replacement by the members of his own people," he
wrote.

On the contrary, the German
people were of the highest racial purity and those destined to be the master
race according to Hitler. To maintain that purity, it was necessary to
avoid intermarriage with subhuman races such as Jews and Slavs.

Germany could stop the Jews
from conquering the world only by eliminating them. By doing so,
Germany could also find Lebensraum, living space, without which the superior
German culture would decay. This living space, Hitler continued, would
come from conquering Russia (which was under the control of Jewish Marxists,
he believed) and the Slavic countries.

This empire would be
launched after democracy was eliminated and a "Fuehrer" called upon to
rebuild the German Reich.

A second volume of Mein
Kampf was published in 1927. It included a history of the Nazi
party to that time and its program, as well as a primer on how to obtain and
retain political power, how to use propaganda and terrorism, and how to
build a political organization.

While Mein Kampf was
crudely written and filled with embarrassing tangents and ramblings, it
struck a responsive chord among its target those Germans who believed it was
their destiny to dominate the world. The book sold over five million
copies by the start of World War II.

Hitler's Rise to Power

Once released from prison,
Hitler decided to seize power constitutionally rather than by force of arms.
Using demagogic oratory, Hitler spoke to scores of mass audiences, calling
for the German people to resist the yoke of Jews and Communists, and to
create a new empire which would rule the world for 1,000 years.

Hitler's Nazi party
captured 18% of the popular vote in the 1930 elections. In 1932,
Hitler ran for President and won 30% of the vote, forcing the eventual
victor, Paul
von Hindenburg, into a runoff election. A political deal
was made to make Hitler chancellor in exchange for his political support.
He was appointed to that office in January 1933.

Upon the death of
Hindenburg in August 1934, Hitler was the consensus successor. With an
improving economy, Hitler claimed credit and consolidated his position as a
dictator, having succeeded in eliminating challenges from other political
parties and government institutions.

The German industrial
machine was built up in preparation for war. By 1937, he was
comfortable enough to put his master plan, as outlined in Mein Kampf,
into effect. Calling his top military aides together at the "Fuehrer
Conference" in November 1937, he outlined his plans for world domination.
Those who objected to the plan were dismissed.

Hitler Launches the War

Hitler ordered the
annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. Hitler's army
invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, sparking France and England to declare
war on Germany.

A Blitzkrieg (lightning
war) of German tanks and infantry swept through most of Western Europe as
nation after nation fell to the German war machine.

In 1941, Hitler ignored a
non-aggression pact he had signed with the Soviet Union in August 1939.
Several early victories after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941,
were reversed with crushing defeats at Moscow (December 1941) and Stalingrad
(winter, 1942-43).

The United States entered
the war in December 1941. By 1944, the Allies invaded occupied Europe
at Normandy Beach on the French coast, German cities were being destroyed by
bombing, and Italy, Germany's major ally under the leadership of Fascist
dictator Benito
Mussolini, had fallen.

Hitler's Last Days

Several attempts were made
on Hitler's life during the war, but none was successful.

As the war appeared to be
inevitably lost and his hand-picked lieutenants, seeing the futility, defied
his orders, he killed himself on April 30, 1945. His long-term
mistress and new bride, Eva Braun, joined him in suicide.

By that time, one of his
chief objectives was achieved with the annihilation of two-thirds of
European Jewry.